Festival of Media Asia: My perspectives

7 March 20132 Comments

What awesome two days.

Happy (and thankful to Rice Communications and FOMA) to be a part of an event like Festival of Media, Asia. Stylish, full of great speaking sessions and good speakers- not just on the quality of speaking but the quality of content they had to talk about.

Apart from that, great questioning by presenters.

Two days- locked in the southern corner of Singapore- hijacking the W Sentosa hotels (they loved it, by the way- judging by their tweets in response to mine ) .

Full of action too: We made the event hashtag #foma13: the highest trending on Twitter, participated in a Guinness book of World Record (attempted by Amobee but botched by technology) and witnessed a flash mob type “Harlem shake” at the event.

Overall well organized, it gave me a chance to meet with long lost professional friends, many of whom I get to meet only at these events.

And of course, a chance to hear and meet the top brass. While I did not attend the Awards Function (updates here), hearing to , and meeting a few of the speakers was awesome. Highlights included Sir Martin Sorrell (WPP), Roger Fisk, Andy Lack (Bloomberg), Leonardo O’Grady (Coca Cola)- on the second day of the event.

I happened to ‘squeeze-in’ some time from Mr Andy Lack: Chief Executive, Bloomberg Media Group, and discussed about The Whiz Times- just to get his casual comments and first reactions. He seemed really interested in the concept and thought this was an idea that could work- as this was filling a niche and high quality content concept. That of course, made my day. This is the gentleman who helped build NBC/CBS, was the top shot at Universal Music (built AC/DC and now Adele) and is now heading a top media company.

Vikram Sakhuja from Maxus India has a really interesting position- he is the global CEO of Maxus- and one of the very few Global CEOs based out of Asia, specifically India. From his perspective, the world corporate leadership will see an Asia shift (China and India) by 2020. He had a really interesting topic to speak on and I would have rather heard on that aspect rather than weaving in ‘Maxus’ heavily in the presentation, which made it seem like a sales pitch.

One of the better presentations was Coca Cola’s. Leonardo O’Grady, ASEAN Integrated Marketing & Communications Director, Coca-Cola was presenting it- and it was mostly the multimedia fanfare that got people all pepped up- but some very interesting case studies on how marketing has to be integrated. Campaigns might live in ‘real’ world- and amplified using various mediums- specifically digital.

Also found Jamie Reigle, Managing Director, APAC, Manchester United’s presentation on Day 1 an eye opener. The club has always been about a lot of other things than core football playing. But the merchandising and the football experience it aims to commercialize, now is quite overwhelming. Anything that can be sold, will be sold. The eye opened were the stats: “Asia has biggest number of Manchster United followers. 325 m out of 659 global followers of the club are out of Asia! That’s half their base! China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam- in that order. India?

Another highlight and a big draw for me was the Media Accelerator Programme (M.A.P.). FIVE businesses pitched their new companies to delegates. Handpicked by 12 members of our M.A.P. Screening Panel – made-up of some of the world’s most influential VCs and consultants- these guys had 5 minutes for their pitch.

Future Ad Labs- a company that is attempting a new take on the ‘Captcha’ by gamifying it. I had my vote for the company too, specifically because that could be something that we could use on The Whiz Times.